Alternate Endings Read online

  Also by N.E. Lasater:

  Farmer’s Son

  “A powerful drama with a conscience”

  Publishers Weekly

  Alternate Endings

  N.E. Lasater

  Copyright © 2016 by N.E. Lasater

  Cover design © 2016 Elizabeth Lasater-Guttmann

  Cover photograph © 2016 N.E. Lasater

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the proper written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Alternate Endings/N.E. Lasater – 1st ed.

  ISBN-13. 978-0-9903069-3-1

  ISBN-10 0-9903069-3-3

  Contents

  September

  October

  November

  December

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  “It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.”

  —Lena Horne

  She couldn’t catch her breath. She gasped and gulped the air, her chest pumping the dry wind that had robbed the wet from her mouth an hour before and a thousand feet below, where the canyon floor met the first long climb.

  Far above her, so high she had to jam her head back onto her sweating shoulders to see it, a red chunky peak scratched the turquoise sky. It topped a peninsula of sheer cliff that rose 1,500 feet in a shark’s fin whose ridge in spots was less than two feet wide. The moody river carving a rusty groove had so far lost to this great stone altar, for the flash floods that routinely killed hikers still swung wide in a respectful bend around its feet.

  She saw them ahead of her still, laughing, their voices young like the perfect day. At first they had included her, walking alongside in the freckled morning as they crossed the shady metal footbridge and began what started as a level stroll. Once the trail had steepened to leave the cottonwood trees, though, the pack of happy teenagers had moved ahead in the basking sun. By the time they arrived at the long dusty switchbacks up the bright west wall of the valley, they had stopped calling back to her.

  “I’m all right!” she yelled to them anyway. “Go on ahead!”

  She was panting now, her chest aching, and her heart beat way too fast. She peered ahead but could only hear them. They had turned a steep corner and were gone. Lightheaded now, with both legs shaking on the sharp incline, she stepped back to the hard wall, her daypack between her spine and the rock. She bent her twitching knees and put her hands on them, then willed her arms to straighten to brace her as she struggled to find her breath.

  September

  “Five. The plane’s at five.”

  Calyce Tate pressed her phone to her ear as she drove south on the George Washington Parkway toward National Airport.

  “Nina won’t come. She wanted Labor Day at her place this year, but how could we all fit in her one-bedroom? And how were we all supposed to afford the trip to Chicago?”

  She interrupted her daughter, who was speaking.

  “I know you and Greg could do it. Me too, but what about Damion? I have to bribe him as it is.”

  Calyce leaned left to feel the steam heat rushing in through her open driver’s side window. She had rolled down all the windows on her old Camry, though the air-conditioning still worked fine.

  “Let Nina stew,” Calyce said. “But you’d think she’d want to see her own mother. No, I’m all right. Just hoarse.”

  Through flashing breaks in the summer trees, she saw far down to the languid Potomac River and the rock cairns of Three Sisters Islands, which cleared the surface by only a few feet. A huge tree had come hurtling downstream sideways in the last big thunderstorm, and its long trunk had caught between two of the tiny islets a child’s height above the water. Browned debris hung in flags from the bare wood.

  She coughed and it hurt her.

  “You can bring red cole slaw. I’ve got the rest.” She smiled. “Tell Jimmy I’m making his cuppie cakes.”

  The call over, she dialed the next with her right thumb and waited with her ear to the phone as cars darted sullenly around her. When no one answered, she dialed it again, punching the same digits with irritation. When her son, Damion, finally answered, she pounced.

  “Were you sleeping? No, I don’t know when you came in. I want you to clean the powder room. I’ve been asking and you haven’t done it and we have people coming. No I can’t. I’ll have your grandmother. Today. I told you. Four fifty-six.”

  Across the slow river, Georgetown University crenellated the ridge with its two piercing steeples and its odd, massive, square croquet arch through which she could see the sky. On the wooded shore below, a clover green and white boathouse had launched student-rowers on two long boats that sliced the glassy water. She watched their rhythm as they moved as one in the bright sun that strobed their white skin.

  “Steak like you like it,” she told Damion. “And barbequed chicken. Yes of course she’s welcome.”

  Key Bridge skipped over the river, its ribboned arches light. She moved to the right to avoid the slow traffic turning left and heading north into D.C., and she continued south along the Virginia side through Rosslyn.

  “Seven? Can’t she get there earlier? That’s too long for Jimmy to wait.”

  But then she laughed at something he said to charm her. “Just tell her to come as soon as she can. Did you update your resume? Then do that too. Starting Tuesday everyone will be back at work.”

  Once she hung up she hitched her thin hips to inch her long legs from the steering column that hit both her knees, and she reached for the typed papers in her lap. She found her half-glasses in the cup holder and pushed them to the bulb of her nose, then swung her eyes between the sheets and the busy road, flipping the pages with increasing annoyance as she drove.

  She had been standing at the end of Terminal B for half an hour but her mother hadn’t showed. Calyce had gone from standing, to standing with her arms crossed, to leaning against a round pillar opposite the short hallway with guards at the end that led in a jog to the gates. She had finally put her heavy shoulder bag on the glossy floor. Above her, honeycombed arches made angles of origami steel, folding into one of the many high cupolas that ran the length of the new building. After twenty minutes, her left black pump had begun tapping.

  After thirty, she picked up her bag, slung it over her tired shoulder, and turned to look behind herself once again up the long main hall toward the other concourses, but her mother still wasn’t coming from that direction either. The plane had landed on time, the signboard said, and had long ago docked at Gate B 32.

  She ascended the escalator to the ticketing level, where the line was long so it took another twelve minutes, according to her watch, to finally step to the counter. All the while, Calyce continued scanning.

  Flight 250, from Tampa.

  “Name?” the young ticket agent said.

  “Effie Guthrie.”

  The blonde typed at a screen they both could see.

  “Not here.”

  “She must be. Is that the final manifest?”

  The woman’s eyebrows walked up her forehead. “I’m telling you. She’s ticketed but she never checked in.”
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  Calyce looked around for someone older. Maybe a man. “Is there a supervisor?”

  “I am the supervisor, and she didn’t board. The seat stayed empty.”

  The young woman cocked her head at the next person in line.

  She dialed, getting no one. Into voicemail she said, “Simon, it’s Calyce. Mom didn’t get on the plane. Has she called you? It’s six o’clock on Sunday. If you hear from her, will you call me? I’m calling Nina.”

  She dialed as she walked to her car in the parking structure behind the terminal, her heels clicking on the gray cement.

  When her sister Nina answered, Calyce said, “Mom didn’t get on the plane in Tampa and she’s not answering her phone. Have you talked to her? . . . No, Chicago is not easier. Not for anyone.”

  She pinched her arms against her slender body.

  “You know how she is. Yes, she treats me like that too.”

  She came downhill on the narrow road that pretzeled through her tight neighborhood of fifty wooden-slat townhouses. After making one left and another, she descended in the twilight past a last row of mailboxes and pulled up at the bottom, at the curb just beyond her one-car driveway, two houses up from the end of her particular cluster. Her white multifold garage door was closed.

  She opened the two doors on the sedan’s passenger side and pulled out six bulky white plastic grocery bags, which she loaded, wincing, onto the crabbed fingers of her hands. She bobbled duck-like over a short, elbowed walkway of fake-brick to her no-glass, solid, blood-red front door, which was the only noticeable color on the home’s exterior. She struggled with the key then twisted herself sideways to step into the tiled entryway. Despite the warm day it was cold, ice-cream cold inside.

  “Are you home?” she stage-whispered, her mouth to one of the two identical closed doors immediately inside. “There’s more in the car.”

  But no one answered. She sighed, then climbed the narrow staircase up the right-hand wall with one arm’s heavy load knocking the other. She thumped the bags onto the linoleum kitchen floor and went to the thermostat on the wall around the corner to turn off the air-conditioning. She switched on the old can lights in the low ceiling and began unpacking the groceries, which she inventoried out loud as she opened the behemoth stainless steel fridge whose French doors curved far beyond the front edge of the laminate counter.

  “But where’s the mayonnaise?”

  She looked again on the door, then checked the cupboard. “I had mayonnaise this morning. And what happened to the eggs?”

  The kitchen occupied the main floor’s far back left corner. The refrigerator faced right on the long left wall while the much older, shallow, single-bowl metal sink was mounted on the shorter rear wall under the one small sash window that slid up only halfway, a floor above the fenced pen of the back yard. On the ground, twelve feet beyond the house, a six-foot spear-pointed fence stood in military precision, beyond which loomed the identical gray-blue backside of an identical cluster of six townhouses on the next street. Calyce and her directly-behind-neighbor watched each other wash dishes every night.

  The small kitchen ended on the right with an interior wall, on the other side of which was a twenty-year-old brown corduroy loveseat with sewn-on cushions like bustles behind the head and over each round arm. Into the far corner on the other side of it was shoved a square pine coffee table that had been purchased originally for a much larger room. On it, a small square-box TV faced out diagonally with its remote placed exactly parallel to the screen.

  Along the long right wall, between the corner table and the top of the stair landing, a matching second brown corduroy loveseat had a pink plush snuggie draped over one arm. Two padded tan faux-leather ottomans sat in the middle of the beige wall-to-wall carpet. On one of them, a woman’s small yellow shoulder bag lay open.

  When she had finished with the groceries, Calyce picked up the purse. She latched it without looking inside and headed downstairs with it. She hung the bag on the same interior door she had spoken to, and she went out again.

  Four minutes later she charged back through the front door with the mail in her hand. On top a white business envelope blared a red banner in alarming lettering. She knocked determinedly on the same door, the yellow purse still dangling.

  “Damion! Are you up? Selene, are you in there?”

  She put her ear to the door. After a moment, she opened the door next to it and peered into an empty garage. Her son’s car wasn’t there.

  Calyce heard them downstairs finally as she was getting ready for bed. The chime of china plates rose to her overhead in the small bathroom of her small master bedroom. She heard their low conspiratorial voices and their shushing and muffled laughter.

  She cinched the belt of her blue chenille bathrobe and slid her feet into her matching backless slippers. Holding the wooden railing she carefully went down, clearing her throat at the bottom so they would hear her.

  She heard the door to the powder room close suddenly and the ceiling fan inside it start to hum as she smelled the warm, inviting smell of oregano in tomato sauce.

  In the kitchen her son Damion stood eating her leftover lasagna. He held the plate near his mouth as he shoveled with a fork. He was shorter than his very tall mother but undeniably beautiful, with close-cropped hair and pecan eyes under lashes so thick they looked false. He wore a neat goatee that focused attention on his lush mouth. His full-face smile could convince anyone of anything.

  “Is she asleep?” He looked at the ceiling, to where the guestroom was above them, next to the master bedroom.

  “She didn’t come. She said she decided to stay home.”

  “You went to the airport?”

  “It was two hours before she answered her phone. She said she was out walking the beach like always.”

  She pointed to the envelope she had left on the counter, inches from the glass lasagna pan whose foil top was now gaping. “Did you see that notice?”

  Damion shrugged.

  “It’s addressed to you,” she said. “May I open it?”

  She tore carefully. “It’s what I thought. They’re canceling if you don’t pay within the next five days.”

  She heard the fan stop in the powder room and the door open, so she hurriedly whispered, “You need to call our insurance agent first thing tomorrow. They may want a certified check. I don’t know. This has never happened before.”

  Selene wandered in, transparently pale with long, fine blonde hair that sat limply on the curve of her bony upper back in her gunmetal summer halter. Her makeup-less eyes were the merest sigh of blue and her eyebrows so blonde they disappeared. She smiled at Damion as she greeted Calyce, and he smiled back, his wet lips pulling his cheeks into four unequal signs, one pair each of less-than and greater-than on either side of his perfect teeth.

  Selene took his now-empty plate and put it in the sink along with his fork, then moved in under the arm he offered. They both leaned against the counter facing Calyce, who had stopped talking. She looked from Selene to Damion and back again as they regarded her.

  “Sorry to wake you,” Selene said. “We’ll be quieter so you can get back to sleep.”

  They stared at her, mute now, but still she didn’t leave. She cleared her throat.

  “What is that?” Damion said. “You do that a lot now. It’s annoying.”

  Calyce looked significantly at Selene but still the young woman didn’t move. “There’s something I need to discuss with my son.”

  Calyce bent her right leg and propped the foot on top of her left slipper, stork-like. Selene said she was going to take a shower and politely wished Calyce goodnight.

  When the door closed to Damion’s room beneath them, he said, “‘My son?’ What am I? Twelve?”

  “I’m sorry, but you were supposed to pay this.”

  “I’ve never paid it before.”

  “You know I changed it so you’d have your own policy.”

  “Which
costs way more. And it moves all the cost for my car to me. You drive it sometimes. You know I don’t have the money.”

  “Which is why you’re looking for a new job, something that fits your degree. Not that bartending.”

  The siren woke her from her light sleep. Calyce jerked as the throbbing wail raced along the dense blocks of streets.

  She felt a sharp lump in her throat and sat up. She tried to swallow but had to cough. As the Doppler effect lowered the siren to a moan, she forced a gulp to clear it, moving her neck like a bird.

  The only light glowed red from the squared digits on the plastic clock that faced her from the end table on the other, empty side of the bed. It was 3:12 a.m.

  From her pillow, she saw out the open glass single door to her Juliet balcony, which wasn’t an actual balcony despite the realtor’s name for it but an outside railing waist high.

  She found a full moon fuzzed by streamers of cirrus clouds as she felt the damp air, which was being chopped rather than moved by the whirring ceiling fan.

  She untied the silk scarf she wore knotted below the knob of bone in the back of her skull. She tied it again, pulling hard on the rabbit-ear ends. She lay back once more and tried to sleep, feeling on her cheek the slick kiss of her satin pillowcase.

  Calyce held the basket in the doorway as the high school seniors shuffled in, heads down and backpacks hung by one strap over slumping shoulders. She blocked each teenager from entering until a smart phone had been relinquished. The new kids who had never had her mewled but the veterans told them to “just give it up, already.” She didn’t slide the basket under her desk until she had collected all twelve.

  “And your computers,” she said as they took their seats around the three outsides of a square U made with long tables, whose open top faced the virgin whiteboard where she stood. Like the rest of the building, everything in the classroom was nearly brand new.